Director and Member of our International team Anna Schirmer on how Lansons is continuing to expand its international network through relationships with the PROI and GFC/Net...
The last three months have been a busy period and it has been a time of extensive focus across Lansons’ consultants on spreading our wings beyond our domestic borders. While Lansons continues to be based ‘just’ in London, firmly rooted in Clerkenwell since the day the company was founded a quarter of a century ago, our work, skills and expertise has spread much further. Lansons, aged 25, is and thinks ‘international’.
‘Being international’ is not something that happened to us overnight - it is a journey we embarked on from the very beginning, almost 25 years ago. We were prompted first by clients' business needs, having worked on projects for international companies around the world, and then by the growing need for communications programmes to reach beyond borders, enabling businesses to reach their audiences on a multi-country or even global scale. As the world we operate in became more connected, so did Lansons.
Today, Lansons’ international connections have helped its clients access an extensive and incredibly valuable global network of top-quality ‘on the ground’ agencies, covering all continents and spreading across fifty two countries. A substantial part of our international agency capabilities are part of two networks of which we are active members: PROI (the world’s largest network of independent agencies by fee income) and GFC/Net (the global financial and corporate communications network). These networks, coupled with the additional local agency connections we seek and maintain, have delivered a number of truly global communications programmes to clients.
But being international is much more than working on multi-country client briefs – it is an attribute that is embedded within our philosophy, spanning all our consultants across all levels. And it is also a challenge! The need to understand the importance of cultural differences or modus operandi of businesses in different countries requires a constant dialogue with those who actually know these markets - our partners, our international staff, our clients. Advising businesses nowadays entails knowledge of the fast-paced, multifaceted environment in which their clients around the world operate in. Single-country, single-culture, single-language limitation leads to an inevitable dead-end!
It is, therefore, unsurprising that in the last three months alone Lansons welcomed six international agencies to our offices, from as far afield as Australia, South Africa, and China, giving us an opportunity to exchange knowledge on the latest developments within our respective markets and agencies.
At the same time ten of our consultants spent time with our partner agencies in India, Singapore, Italy, Germany, the US and many more – observing how they operate, and getting to know consultants on the ground, ensuring that we’re able to support our clients’ global ambitions. And being international has been reflected right through to our consultants - today, Lansons speaks over 10 foreign languages – French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Mandarin, Malayam and Bulgarian (and many of those are mother tongues or bilingual speakers).
2015 is set to continue in the way we started it – we will play an active role at both global annual meetings for PROI (taking place in South Africa this year) and GFC/ Net (taking place in Paris) and we are planning further exchanges with our international connections.
If you are interested in finding out more about Lansons’ international capabilities, either take a look at our website or please do get in touch directly - we’d love to hear from you.